East Africa Economic Report

  Even before they were red-inked, Kenya's Adani Infrastructure development deals had generated more heat than sense. The calls for their rejection began in mid-October when a Senator alleged in the Senate  that the International Airport in Nairobi “had been sold.” He did not provide any evidence to back his claim. Soon the hysteria spread like a bush fire with all sorts of people decrying the alleged sale. At the same time, Adani inked a contract to build electricity transmission lines on a PPP basis. This outcry, which many observers suspected to be a political red herring, exposed the level of hypocrisy or ignorance of the legal profession in Kenya. The Law Society of Kenya rushed to court seeking to stop the alleged sale. What the LSK did not tell us is that the Airport deal was at the proposal stage—that it had just entered the ground floor of a five-floor process. A proposal faces many landmines on the way and can fail at any point before a contract is signed. For in...

  The Financial Market in East Africa is gradually being indigenized, we can report. In Kenya and Tanzania, indigenous banks have taken over the domestic market, shunting foreign banks to the periphery. We can also report that Kenya is the financial hub of Eastern Africa, an analysis of the H1 2024 financial reports of the leading banks shows. Their Asset base is also growing, meaning they are entrenched in the market.  Generally, the Capital base for all top banks has doubled in the last five years. In 2019, Kenya’s KCB had a capital base of US$8.6 billion. As at the end of H1 2024, the capital base stood at $17.17 billion, while Equity’s asset base grew from US$6.8 billion in 2019 billion to $13.7 billion in the first half of this year. In Tanzania, CRDB has more than doubled its asset base from $2.52 billion in 2019 to the current $5.7 billion, while NMB, the second largest bank in Tanzania, has seen its asset base grow from $2.36 billion in 2019 to the current $5.0...